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CENTURY of WOMEN NANCY M c CLELLAND EILEEN GRAY SYR IE MAUGHAM RUBY ROSS WOOD ROSE CUMM ING DOROTHY DRAPER ELEANOR M c M ILLEN BROWN MADELEINE CASTAING ANDRÉE PUTMAN BARBARA D’A RCY BUNNY WILLIAMS BARBARA BARRY
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Nancy McClelland 1877–1959
“I don’t know what special qualifications I had for the work except a great delight and love for beautiful old things.”
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oday’s designers may not recognize Nancy McClelland’s name, but they owe her a debt of gratitude. A contemporary of Elsie de Wolfe and Ruby Ross Wood, the serious-minded McClelland, one of the design industry’s earliest and most ardent advocates, played a signifi-
cant role in making interior design a legitimate profession. “Fed up” that no dictionary provided an adequate definition of a decorator, she helped to organize a nationally publicized effort in the 1930s to formalize the role of the interior designer by devising a standard definition that emphasized education and training. Vassar-educated, McClelland became renowned for her expertise on antiques and historical wallpapers, subsequently documented in her series of influential books. Her first work, Historic Wall-Papers, published in 1924, remains an authoritative resource on the subject. So keen was her interest in antique wallpapers that, in an early example of designer branding, she expanded her decorating business to include a namesake line of reproduction papers. McClelland’s role as an industry leader was cemented when she became one of the founding members, and later the first female president, of the American Institute of Interior Decorators, now known as ASID. But her greatest popular influence was the founding of Au Quatrième, the decorating and antiques division of the long-gone Wanamaker’s department store in New York City. A novel idea when introduced in 1913, Au Quatrième was a resounding success, establishing the new “department stores” as influencers of popular taste. A long line of decorators would go on to cut their teeth at retail establishments, including Ruby Ross Wood, who succeeded McClelland at Wanamaker’s, William Pahlmann at Lord & Taylor, Barbara D’Arcy at Bloomingdale’s, and too many to name at Ralph Lauren. But Nancy McClelland was the first.
Left A desk was an appropriate setting for McClelland, who was one of the best educated, and most academic, of early twentiethcentury designers. Above left A hallmark of McClelland’s work was her use of wallpaper, usually antique. An authority on historical wall-coverings, the decorator launched a collection of reproduction papers. Opposite Like many of her fellow lady decorators, McClelland dabbled in high-style modern flourishes, such as these wrought iron trees, accented with melon-shaped lights, on a twenties-era high-rise terrace. 34 | A C E N T U R Y O F W O M E N
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Eileen Gray 1878–1976
“Clients did not come—they found what I did upsetting. This is funny, isn’t it?”
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odernism’s early practitioners were an old-boy network of architects who took a clinical approach to interior design. The exception was Eileen Gray, who
brought the concept of luxury to their bare-bones world of form and function. An Irishwoman, Gray moved to Paris in 1902, where her fine arts studies evolved into one of her earliest successes: lacquered furniture. Using centuries-old Asian techniques, Gray designed pieces of such Art Deco splendor they became the toast of Jazz Age Paris, and well beyond. In 2009, Gray’s lacquered Dragons chair sold for $28 million at the auction of the Yves Saint Laurent estate, a record price for early twentieth-century furniture. But despite the fame it brought her, Gray’s lacquer phase was short-lived. In an artistic about-face, she rejected conventional furniture and embraced the Machine Age, adopting an entirely new set of materials: chrome and tubular steel. At first, she applied her newfound viewpoint to furniture design, the best example being the plump leather and steel Bibendum chair, which looks more than a little like the Michelin Man, for whom the chair was named. Her pioneering vision was fully expressed, however, in what is now considered a crowning achievement of early modernist architecture: E.1027, the minimal yet luxurious house she designed in the late 1920s on the French coast near Nice, at the border with Italy. Gray conceived a home for herself that was practical—with built-in furniture throughout—yet without the sterility of, say, the work of Le Corbusier. He, it seems, was so jealous of the home’s success he later vandalized it by painting murals on its white walls. But it is the furniture Gray designed for the house for which she is best remembered, especially her adjustable glass and tubular-steel E1027 drinks table, with its distinctive chain— one of the most enduring examples of early-modernist furniture still in production today.
Above left Photographed in her adopted city of Paris in 1926, the stylish Gray cut quite a figure among the city’s smartest circles. Left Gray’s 1923 Monte Carlo Room, a bedroom-boudoir conceived for an exhibition, allowed the designer to display her skill with luxurious finishes, including a black-lacquered divan with fur cover, a dark-red-and-white lacquered screen, and a ceiling light made of parchment. 36 | A C E N T U R Y O F W O M E N
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Right In E.1027, her innovative home near Nice, Gray revolutionized the International style with her Bibendum chair (left) and Transat chair (right), her interpretation of a deck chair. Below Gray’s enduring E1027 table, placed bedside in the home’s guest room. Gray used strong color, unlike her fellow modernists.
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Syrie Maugham 1879–1955
“Elimination is one of the secrets of successful interior design.”
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yrie Maugham was an English maverick who defined the look of 1930s glamour. She herself was captivating, prompting Cecil Beaton to call her “a woman with flair and a strong personal taste of her own.” The ex-wife of the English writer Somerset Maugham, she was a noted London hostess and friend to the Bright Young Things, including the flamboyant Stephen Tennant, whose house, Wilsford Manor, she helped to decorate with ample yardage of satin and more than a trace of baroque pastiche. Maugham frequently bent the rules, especially when it came to antique furniture, which she often had pickled or stripped bare of its finish. It’s hard to imagine anything that could have been more shocking in England at the time. Then there was her penchant for plaster palm-tree columns and furniture, which lent a previously unimaginable theatricality to many upper-class English homes. But it was the color white that earned the
designer transatlantic fame as well as the sobriquet, the White Queen. Assisted by her pickling and
Above Around 1930, the photographer Cecil Beaton, an admirer of Maugham, captured the designer as the White Queen, posing her in his trademark fashion: against a stylized backdrop. Opposite The most celebrated room of 1930s London, Maugham’s music room, in her King’s Road home, was a carefully orchestrated ensemble of whites and creams, a mirrored screen, a low table by Jean-Michel Frank, and a modern rug by Marion Dorn. Overleaf Glamour defined Maugham’s work, especially her Mayfair bedroom for Rebecca Sieff in 1936. Amid the draped satin and sheepskin rug was an upholstered sleigh bed, a Maugham signature.
plaster, Maugham spawned a craze for whitewashed rooms that, along with portraits by Cecil Beaton and Constance Spry floral arrangements, spelled chic to Londoners between the wars. To be fair, other designers, such as Elsie de Wolfe, were experimenting with white, too, but it was Maugham who provided the decade-defining example of it: her own all-white music room, described in Vogue as: “Bare white plaster walls, furniture done up in whitewash satin and brocade, silver curtains, a white rug by Marion Dorn, flaring white peacock feathers.” Within just a few years of their unveiling, white rooms would seem passé. Maugham changed direction with the fashion, and showed equal command of vibrant colors; her scheme for the vivid Chinese-papered Palm Beach living room of Mona and Harrison Williams, immortalized in a famous Beaton illustration, is just one example. Nevertheless, her association with the color white has stuck, and it is that for which she will always be remembered.
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Ruby Ross Wood 1880–1950
“It’s when they stop copying you that it’s time to worry.”
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espite her sideways start in the interior design world— as a young journalist, she ghostwrote Elsie de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste—Ruby Ross Wood eventually joined the ranks of the great lady decorators, gaining attention in part because of her trademark rose-colored glasses. Unyielding about herself—she notoriously wore sweaters and coats to keep warm in the summer and was known to play solitaire for hours in lieu of physical exercise—Wood
was deceptively adventurous when it came to decorating, fearlessly mixing previously unmixable furnishings to create rooms unlike those of any other designer.
For example, there was the Manhattan dining room she conceived for the young Brooke Astor. On the one hand, the room dazzled with thirties-era glamour thanks to sleek white walls and a gleaming glass fireplace mantel, on which a pair of avant-garde Jean-Michel Frank plaster masks were displayed. And yet demurely holding court in the center of the room were a very traditional Directoire fruitwood table and chairs. It was a surprising combination, but like all her
dashing efforts, it worked. Equally unexpected were Wood’s daring color combinations, like the brown, black, and white scheme she chose for another client’s dining room. It might be hard to fathom today, but this color medley was considered radical in the early 1930s. Her own talent aside, Wood can claim credit for one of the century’s greatest decorators, Billy Baldwin. She took the young Baldwin under her wing when he moved to New York City and honed his style until, like his mentor, he was always two steps ahead of everyone else. As Baldwin once wrote of her, “She was quite simply the finest decorator who ever lived.”
Above According to Billy Baldwin, Ruby Ross Wood wore a “usual costume: veiled hat, clanking gold bracelet, round rose-colored glasses.” Opposite A mirrored fireplace, jauntily trimmed slipper chairs, and white carpet, in the H. Mercer Walkers’ Manhattan apartment in 1937, are classic Wood flair. Overleaf Wood decorated this remarkably timeless living room for the Wolcott Blairs in a buffed-out palette. The “slipcovered” desk is pure Wood.
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Rose Cumming 1887–1968
“Muted tones . . . are my enemies.”
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arked by aesthetic madness and a faded Sunset Boulevard aura, Rose Cumming, the Australian expat who moved to Manhattan in 1917 and took up decorating out of boredom, was one of the design world’s most original originals. At times, her work could be the very picture of propriety: ladylike antiques, damask upholstery, English paneling, and floral-strewn fabrics. But more often than not, puddled curtains aside, Cumming’s style was far more curious than anything ever seen on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Starting with her violet-tinted hair . . . To those who knew her—including the designers Mario Buatta, Mark Hampton, and Tom Britt, who all, as young men, willingly spent the occasional Saturday cleaning her glamorous West Fifty-Third Street townhouse—
Cumming was weird and wonderful, and the same thing could be said of her work. Her color combinations (think blues paired with purples) were offbeat but ravishing, as were the densely patterned, strangely colored fabrics bearing banana leaves, leopard spots (in pink, no less), and lush delphiniums that were sold through
her much-vaunted Madison Avenue antiques shop. Then there was her fondness for Coromandel screens, antique Chinese wallpaper, Foo dogs, and pagodas, which suffused her work with the atmosphere of the Celestial Empire. Mirror, crystal, silver leaf, and even lamé—drama lurked around every corner. In her legendary townhouse, Cumming became infamous for her so-called Ugly Room, a subversive phantasmagoria of beasts, snakes, and all manner of bizarre furnishings. It was macabre and quite unlike her other work, but it was right on-message, establishing her as the designer from whom one should expect the unexpected.
Opposite Cumming, photographed for an issue of Harper’s Bazaar wearing a Turkish robe in her legendary Manhattan fabrics and antiques shop. Below A reflection of Cumming’s proudly eccentric personality, the so-called Ugly Room in her West Fifty-Third Street townhouse was notable for its “sinister, ugly, destructive, or macabre objects and decorations.”
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More typical of Cumming’s feminine style was her drawing room, with its eighteenth-century Chinese wallpaper. “It was really a drawing room,” a dazzled Tom Britt recalled. Despite its beauty, it lacked “lounging furniture.”
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Dorothy Draper 1889–1969
“Don’t ever be afraid to experiment with old things— some of the smartest effects were achieved because someone used brains instead of money!”
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bustling design practice, a series of books, hotel projects, licensed product collections, advertising endorsements—common aspirations for today’s ambitious designers, but for Dorothy Draper, an early twentiethcentury trailblazer in designer branding, all were breakthroughs in an innovative career. Born in the upper-crust enclave of Tuxedo Park, New York, Draper overcame the social confines of her class and her lack of formal training, boldly launching a decorating business in 1920s Manhattan. A savvy marketer—perhaps one of the best this business has ever known—she managed to parlay a few early residential projects into a string of high-profile commercial jobs, including the interiors of the Carlyle Hotel and Hampshire House in New York, and the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. The Draper look was bold, particularly in the hotels she decorated. Black-and-white checkerboard floors, baroque plaster ornamentation, jewel-colored walls paired with widestriped fabrics and cabbage-rose chintzes, and overscaled everything—no lampshade ever seemed big enough for her— all defined Draper’s work. Nowhere was this more evident than in her dazzling decorative scheme for the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, the masterpiece of her career. Her much-publicized design projects brought her acclaim. But it was her series of how-to books (most notably her 1939 bible Decorating is Fun!, which blithely encouraged readers to bleach their Oriental rugs and take a saw to the legs of antique tables); her mass-market collections of fabrics, furniture, and even gift wrap; and her nationally syndicated newspaper column that made her a household name.
With the marketing skills to match all that talent, Draper created the blueprint from which scores of designers have since built their careers.
Above Draper, seen here in 1942, was the most publicized, and perhaps most photographed, decorator of her day. Opposite Oversize lacquered lampshades and beefy stripes, preferably five inches wide, were constants throughout Draper’s work.
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Above Checkerboard floors and baroque plaster flourishes— unmistakable Draper style—greeted guests at the Camellia House restaurant in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. Opposite Draper’s flair for the theatrical was evident at the Greenbrier resort, where a wall clock was dramtized with showy plasterwork.
Overleaf At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the designer outfitted a now-lost restaurant, nicknamed the Dorotheum, with birdcage chandeliers, black-and-white columns, and nymphs frolicking in a pool.
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Eleanor McMillen Brown 1890–1991
“There is nothing more trite than a set period.”
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lways respectfully addressed as Mrs. Brown by her employees and peers alike, Eleanor McMillen Brown, who played a role at her firm until her nineties, had what might well have been the lengthiest career of any interior designer. No doubt influenced by her rich entrepreneurial father, who was a cofounder of Magic Chef stoves, Brown brought a businesslike approach to decorating, and arguably
turned the ad hoc women’s world she entered into a profession with standards. After taking sec-
Top A McMillen Inc. room always projected propriety, as did Eleanor McMillen Brown herself. Above No slave to convention, Brown could also be daring, as when she decorated this St. Louis living room in the late 1930s using an unusual eggplant-colored fabric on the walls. Opposite Brown became a favorite designer of the American upper class, including Mrs. Henry Ford II, whose bedroom is illustrated here. Overleaf Brown first decorated her Sutton Place apartment in 1928, including this cheery yellow living room. Over the decades, until her death, she rarely changed a thing.
retarial classes and studying at the Parsons School of Design, she worked briefly for the esteemed designer Elsie Cobb Wilson, and in 1924 founded her own firm, naming it McMillen Inc. She even insisted that all her employees be Parsons graduates, too. “I thought if I was going to do it at all, I’d better do it professionally,” she said. “That’s why it’s McMillen Inc. and not Eleanor McMillen. I wasn’t one of the ‘ladies.’” As poised and polished as her work, Brown quickly found success decorating for her upper-class friends, for whom she devised posh rooms that, in turn, made McMillen Inc. a synonym for impeccable taste and correctness. A well-heeled mix of mostly eighteenth-century French antiques and modern furnishings became a McMillen signature, as did mild-mannered color palettes. A sign of good breeding for a certain circle, the McMillen style even made its way into the newlywed home of Sister Parish, whose mother enlisted Brown’s expertise as a wedding gift. Parish later crabbed, “I never forgave my mother.” The financially savvy Brown so successfully laid McMillen’s foundation that it remains one of Manhattan’s premier design firms. A tour through McMillen polished the résumés of a generation of celebrated interior designers, including Albert Hadley and Mark Hampton. But one of Brown’s more interesting achievements was the fierce loyalty she earned from her employees. Many talented designers worked under the McMillen flag for the duration of their careers, notably Betty Sherrill, whose nearly forty-year tenure at McMillen made her a legend, like Mrs. Brown.
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Madeleine Castaing 1894–1992
“Personally, I just follow my instinct, amuse myself creating an atmosphere, mix up all sorts of things I like.”
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he Proust of twentieth-century decorating, Madeleine Castaing held court for decades in her antiques shop on the rue Jacob in Paris, welcoming admirers and refusing to sell much of anything to anybody. She possessed an independent streak that made both her and her work anachronisms in their time, and even today, her work maintains an air of mystery. While the majority of her peers were
experimenting with the latest fashions, Castaing defiantly immersed her work squarely in the nineteenth century. Difficult to pigeon-hole, her interiors paid homage to no one particular historical style, instead representing a patchwork of often unfashionable influences. English Regency and Napoleon III furniture were particular favorites of hers, as was leopard-print carpet, an Empireperiod fashion. Her rooms were filled with black accents; she especially loved ebonized furniture. A certain shade of blue, somewhere in the neighborhood of a
Tiffany box, will forever belong to her and her alone. A sense of decay pervaded her rooms, whether achieved intentionally, through the use of furnishings “past their prime,” or by mistake, in the tears and stains that the designer preferred not to mend. Castaing would channel the romantic past and conceal a room’s origins until it seemed formed over a great length of time, in stark contrast to the pristine—and, in her mind, soulless— work of her contemporaries. Given that she lived through some of the most dazzling moments in twentieth-century modernism—Paris in the twenties comes to mind—the fact that her work makes not even the slightest reference to them is remarkable and even radical. Deeply nostalgic and sentimental to her core, Castaing was a voice in the wilderness, not least for her unforgettable appearance: extravagant false lashes, overly made-up red lips, and a bob-length wig conspicuously held in place by a chin strap.
Opposite Part of Castaing’s persona was her extraordinary appearance, including her wig’s visible chin strap and her overly made-up lips and eyes. Left The Grand Salon of Castaing’s apartment in Paris. “New” and “sparkling” were not in the designer’s vocabulary. Downstairs was her fabled shop.
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At Lèves, Castaing’s cherished country house near Chartres, the designer’s romantic style was on full display in her trademark leopard-print carpet and “Castaing blue” coolie lampshades.
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Andrée Putman 1925–2013
“If you give in to all the temptations of adding, you introduce the drop of poison that will age what you’ve done.”
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he 1980s were a series of wildly different design trends, from the quaint—the simple pleasures of country living providing a respite from the decade’s grandiosity—to the quirky, culminating in the oddball furniture of the Memphis Group. But cutting like a knife through the tangle of competing tastes was le style Putman, the sleek and sometimes severe look of French designer Andrée Putman. A selflabeled “archaeologist of modernity,” Putman sought inspiration from early modernism, dramatizing its rigor into a style all her own. As sharp as the padded-shouldered silhouette made famous by those other eighties-defining French powerhouses, the fashion designers Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, Putman’s work was precise, disciplined, and
rarely prone to embellishment. “Sweet and clean envelopes for exceptional human beings” was how she once described her interiors, which were admired by an exceptional clientele that included Karl Lagerfeld, Azzedine Alaïa, and Yves Saint Laurent. Barring her signature crimson lipstick, Putman dressed the way she decorated, in a monochromatic palette of white, black, and—sometimes— gray. Patterned fabrics were not even a possibility. Said the designer, “prints are an aggression you never asked for.” Models of restraint, Putman’s rooms were striking for what little was in them: reproductions of twentiesand thirties-era modernist furniture by Eileen Gray, JeanMichel Frank, and Pierre Chareau, whose designs Putman licensed and made popular again through her company Ecart International. A celebrity in her native France, Putman finally conquered America in the middle of the eighties, when she was hired by Studio 54 impresarios Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell to remake the old Morgans Hotel in Manhattan, which she did in groundbreaking fashion. A statementmaking black-and-white lobby reminiscent of a disco, minimally appointed guest rooms devoid of color, blackand-white-checkerboard tiled bathrooms, and Robert Mapplethorpe photography all established the hotel as the temple of cutting-edge chic. An instant success when it opened in 1984, Morgans launched the boutique-hotel craze that has yet to wane decades later. Looking back,
Putman’s work was the template for the mass marketing of hipness.
Opposite Putman practiced what she preached, wearing a monochromatic wardrobe as tightly edited as her interiors. Left Some of the most talked-about bathrooms of the late twentieth century were in Morgans Hotel in Manhattan, where Putman’s use of black-and-white checkerboard tile caused a sensation.
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Above French Minister of Culture Jack Lang’s Paris office, designed by Putman in 1984, underscored the designer’s belief in “sumptuous austerity.” Right “Light and space are the stars,” Putman said, and nowhere was this more true than in her own loft in Paris, one of the city’s most exciting and influential interiors in the 1980s.
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Barbara D’Arcy 1928–2012
“In those sixteen years [at Bloomingdale’s], I got out of my system everything I could ever think of.”
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Top Although she explored every style under the sun, Barbara D’Arcy proved most creative when working with cutting-edge materials. Above The Bloomingdale’s model room that caused the biggest splash was the Cave Room, with undulating walls made of sprayed foam. Opposite For another model, D’Arcy fashioned an acrylic platform and colored lights into a bedroom that spelled the future.
he year is 1973. You’re a New Yorker. It’s Sunday, and after quiche and Bloody Marys with your friends at brunch, you slip on your yellow-tinted aviators and head where all sophisticated New Yorkers head—for a stroll through the crush at the most unique singles bar in New York: the model rooms at Bloomingdale’s department store. Zen. Scandinavian. Tuscan. Provençal. The Egypt of King Tut. Modern and . . . inflatable. Who else but Barbara D’Arcy, the designer responsible for these legendary rooms, can claim credit for decorating spaces of such staggering variety? She had complete freedom to let her imagination run wild, and was quite possibly the only decorator ever not to be burdened with pesky clients. D’Arcy spent the 1960s and 1970s executing vignettes so sensational they attracted not only shoppers, but became required viewing for fellow designers, the media, and style setters in every field. Whether they were flights of fancy, as D’Arcy called her zanier efforts, or more traditionally appointed, the designer decorated every room with the kind of attention not usually lavished on department store settings. Built around themes, each room was an environment, with fully fleshed out decorative schemes against very believable architecture and scenic backdrops. Her Cave Room, for example, was a futuristic grotto with a mirrored floor and an illuminated Plexiglas dining table surrounded by undulating white walls made of sprayed foam. Yet she was equally capable of doing a historical re-creation of an Elizabethan manor house down to its rough-hewn timber and beams. In those years, Bloomingdale’s was always one step ahead of everybody, and D’Arcy was the disseminator of nonstop trends and new furniture styles; it was she who helped introduce architect Frank Gehry’s cardboard furniture to the general public. She might have been motivated by selling merchandise, but her influence on American taste was far more consequential than just that. With a
stage that gave her a reach far greater than any other designer, D’A rcy was a major player in shaping the look of the late twentieth-century American home.
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Bunny Williams 1944–
“Even more important than the food is the atmosphere you create—that’s what people are really going to remember.”
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he most high-profile alumna of Parish-Hadley Associates, Bunny Williams followed the best education a designer could receive with a huge career. A respected traditionalist in the vein of Sister Parish, Williams knows instinctively how to make a house functional and beautiful. Yet unlike Parish, Williams is precise and methodical when planning a room, a discipline encouraged by the meticulous Albert Hadley. “Albert made me the designer I am. She [Parish] made me the decorator I am.” Famous for creating some of the most livable interiors around—“when a room is lived in, you can feel it,” she once wrote—Williams lavishes rooms with the attention they need to work. Her beautifully balanced furniture
plans, an art dying fast in the era of the sectional, are masterful. Seating is indulgent and convenient to
Above Assuming the role once occupied by Sister Parish, Bunny Williams is today’s grande dame of American decorating. Opposite “I can’t imagine not having a beautiful bedroom,” says Williams, whose own New York City bedroom is built around a mirrored four-poster. Overleaf This well-proportioned living room in Virginia gave Williams the space to do what she does best: make a room balanced and functional through masterfully placed furniture.
drinks tables—a boon for any guest in it for the long haul. Lighting flatters both the room and its occupants. If it seems as if Williams designs her rooms with entertaining in mind, it’s because she herself is a well-known hostess, who is always prepared for spur-of-the-moment gatherings by stocking her freezer with cheese straws and miniature sausage biscuits, both delicacies reflective of her Southern upbringing. But as carefully chosen as everything is, Williams makes sure to do what many designers are loath to do: give a room the impression of her never having been there. A master of the undecorated look, Williams layers rooms with textiles, antique furniture, and one-off accessories, all of which appear to have been gathered over time, not necessarily culled in one sweep. Williams concurrently heads a thriving design practice based in New York; has written several books, including one of the most successful design books ever published, An Affair With a House; lectures at scores of events; and oversees a network of licensed product lines that have made her one of today’s most successful American designers. And with her husband, the furniture and antiques dealer John Rosselli, there may be no greater design power couple in New York.
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Barbara Barry 1952–
“Design is a religion to me.”
L
ike Elsie de Wolfe before her, California designer Barbara Barry considers interior design a spiritual calling and has made it her life’s mission “to help people live a beautiful life.” Her work is the picture of self-composure, with nary a hair out of place. She swept away the chintzes and fringes of the 1980s and ushered in the modern era of dark woods silhouetted against creamy walls. When there was color, it was limited to the pale and pastel—peach, celadon—forming a palette distinctly her own. Patternless, her rooms were blemish-free. And they had the unmistakable Art Deco glamour of her home city, Los Angeles, though reminiscent more of the cool blonde than the platinum siren. Still, Barry would say her mission goes deeper, intended to enhance all aspects of living, even the most mundane. “It’s the small things we see and touch every day that leave an impression and give us serenity.” For her, those small things include drinking tea only from a porcelain cup and decanting detergent into an attractive vessel, a practice that will likely forever be associated with the designer. Through it all, the woman has styled herself to look astonishingly like her rooms, cultivating an immaculate appearance that almost always includes kitten heels, pearl necklaces, and swing skirts, not to mention her muchenvied coif, which is perfectly tousled. Graduating from the role of interior designer to that of lifestyle designer,
Barry became one of the 1990s’ most bankable brands, one that continues to thrive today. With books, furniture, bed linens, china, and even a line of teas to her name, Barry designs her product collections as she does her interiors: with a clear sense of purpose. “It’s not about how much we have but about how what we have serves us.”
Above left Partial to soft colors and quiet fabrics, Barbara Barry is “not a chintz gal.” Left Known for rooms with clean lines, Barry likens design to tea: “What you leave out is as important as what you put in.” Opposite Some suggestion of Art Deco and Hollywood glamour always comes through in Barry’s work.
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